Phil's First Steinbeck

[Philip Coates]

"Phil's First Steinbeck"

Years ago, I think I skimmed some Steinbeck and maybe read a short piece. But it was so long ago, I was so little able to appreciate his writing, and it registered so little, that for all practical purposes "The Grapes of Wrath" is my first Steinbeck. I just finished it several days ago. And it hit me with tremendous power.

The reputation of the book was not enough to attract me. It is painted by many as just a political novel, merely a socialist tract.

Conservatives have long made that argument. More recently, Harry Binswanger speaks of "two notoriously socialist novels: Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." -->

http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/arts/literature/6263-differing-reactions-to-ayn-rand-s-novel-atlas-shrugged.html

The characterization of the first as a "socialist novel" is grossly misstated, taking a distant implication and making it the heart of what is much more than a political tract. And HB admits he hasn't read either novel. Steinbeck's sympathies lean to the Left, but this book is about the plight of those dispossessed by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. And how they struggle; it's not about abolishing private property or about a prescription for the size and role of government. (He does give his vaguely left-leaning solutions and his blame for poverty on 'greed', but that is not central to the novel - the novel is about people and character. And he does have poor families helping other families, but that is not always altruism. The point made many times is they'll help us when we need it - and at a couple points two families 'join forces'. Each helps the other, when it is time to do so..sort of like the old-fashioned barn-raisings.)

Binswanger quotes a brief passage of a character speaking in dialect and draws the following sweeping conclusion: "the common denominator is a strong preference for the familiar and ordinary over the challenging and innovative, plus a desire to feel sympathy with the helpless rather than admiration for the heroic. "

Every bit of that is false. The central characters Steinbeck portrays, the Joad family, are not helpless and not ordinary. And they are deeply admirable. Enormously, inspiringly so. Heroic people dealing with adversity. Fortitude, character, resourcefulness, always moving forward whether dealing with drought or floods, loss of a farm, brutal cops, the Depression-era surplus of labor. You wonder if you would be able to do the things they did.

Reminds me a bit of Rocky Balboa. Not well-educated or articulate, but enormously determined to lift himself by his bootstraps, inspired by a tremendously difficult goal. One day after playing volleyball with Harry and Peter Schwartz, some of us went out for coffee, if I recall, and I remember Harry saying he had disliked Rocky I. He doesn't want to see characters who pull themselves up from the gutter to the sidewalk; he's only interested in seeing them pull themselves from the sidewalk to the penthouse. My reaction (probably more polite): "You poor fool. Sometimes it takes the most enormous moral strength, the most heroic effort just to get yourself out of the gutter and onto the sidewalk."

There is a wide range of characters of different motives and stature and personality types. John Steinbeck's "Americana" has the ring of truth. The conflicts and plot are strong.

If anyone's interested, I have some beautiful passages illustrating some of the following: Steinbeck's humor, his great descriptive powers, his great writing skill.

(As I mentioned on another thread, when I was a third of the way through this long novel I worried about it getting repetitious or petering out or getting bored with the main characters. None of that happens. It holds you right to the end. And you may even wish it went longer so you could be sure what happens to the family.)

This is one of the great American novels. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with politics.

Edited April 4, 2011 by Philip Coates

[Brant Gaede]

The director of the movie was forced to tack on an upbeat ending and the movie didn't work when shown to Soviet audiences who were struck by the fact that all these dispossessed people had automobiles.

--Brant

[Philip Coates]

That's funny. I haven't seen the movie for the same reason I had no interest in reading the book for so long: thought it would just be another "leftist tract". And I overdosed on those in all those college humanities courses.

[jriggenbach]

"Phil's First Steinbeck"

Years ago, I think I skimmed some Steinbeck and maybe read a short piece. But it was so long ago, I was so little able to appreciate his writing, and it registered so little, that for all practical purposes "The Grapes of Wrath" is my first Steinbeck. I just finished it several days ago. And it hit me with tremendous power.

The reputation of the book was not enough to attract me. It is painted by many as just a political novel, merely a socialist tract.

Conservatives have long made that argument. More recently, Harry Binswanger speaks of "two notoriously socialist novels: Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." -->

http://www.capitalis...s-shrugged.html

The characterization of the first as a "socialist novel" is grossly misstated, taking a distant implication and making it the heart of what is much more than a political tract. And HB admits he hasn't read either novel. Steinbeck's sympathies lean to the Left, but this book is about the plight of those dispossessed by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. And how they struggle; it's not about abolishing private property or about a prescription for the size and role of government. (He does give his vaguely left-leaning solutions and his blame for poverty on 'greed', but that is not central to the novel - the novel is about people and character. And he does have poor families helping other families, but that is not always altruism. The point made many times is they'll help us when we need it - and at a couple points two families 'join forces'. Each helps the other, when it is time to do so..sort of like the old-fashioned barn-raisings.)

Binswanger quotes a brief passage of a character speaking in dialect and draws the following sweeping conclusion: "the common denominator is a strong preference for the familiar and ordinary over the challenging and innovative, plus a desire to feel sympathy with the helpless rather than admiration for the heroic. "

Every bit of that is false.

Some readers might draw from this the conclusion that it is probably a bad idea to take at face value any discussion by any high-ranking Objectivist (from Ayn Rand herself on down) of any novelist or philosopher (Immanuel Kant, for example), without doing one's own reading and making one's own judgment. Some others would probably never even consider such a conclusion.

It holds you right to the end. And you may even wish it went longer so you could be sure what happens to the family.

It didn't hold me right to the end. I did not wish it had been longer. I'm inclined to regard Steinbeck's shorter work (his short stories and his shorter novels like Of Mice & Men) as his best work.

This is one of the great American novels.

How could you possibly know that? You haven't even read a representative sample of the American novels most knowledgeable people would regard as in the running with The Grapes of Wrath. I could name American novelists of that league that I bet you've never even heard of. You haven't even read any of Steinbeck's other novels. Yet you know how this one ranks relative to all those you've never read and, in many cases, haven't even heard of?

JR

[caroljane]

Phil, I implore you and beg you, do not respond to Jeff. Just this one time only, think about this:

"The Grapes of Wrath has been called a great American novel, and after reading it, I believe it to be great by my own criteria and feel powerfully moved by it. Reading is my own personal experience and while it is interesting to know that many critics agree with my reaction, I do not need to have read every other American novel and construct a hierarchy of greatness, in order to declare that it is great."

Please plagiarize me, Phil, for all our sakes.

[Selene]

Carol:

Self-sacrifice being preached...tsk tsk!

I will forgive the super Mom "instinct" for this one.

Adam

with empathy

Edited April 4, 2011 by Selene

[Philip Coates]

Thanks, Carol, I concur and will take your advice.

( These little fights are probably boring others...I know they're boring me.)

Edited April 4, 2011 by Philip Coates

[jriggenbach]

Thanks, Carol, I concur and will take your advice.

( These little fights are probably boring others...I know they're boring me.)

Okay.

I can't say I'm that interested in the continuing fights, myself.

I'm just sayin' . . .

JR

[caroljane]

Adam, you nailed me. Instinct or conditioned reflex, decades of trying and sometimes succeeding in preventing the boys from "fighting something awful" just kicked in there - but rationally maybe. As I've said Objectivism is insidious and I fear it is starting to have some kind of good influence on me.

Phil, do you have any input into the selections for next year's books? You already know I would lobby for a Renault (they're short) - and the historical novel genre is getting an intellectual boost from Mantel and others. There are so many excellent ones (Cecelia Holland for example).

For the long novels, at least one Victorian - Eliot or Thackeray, Middlemarch or Vanity Fair for preference. They're just so entertaining, so vivid - you sink into them. Life in the round. And they are in their disparate ways hugely moral, with real heroes emerging from Thackeray's cynicism and Eliot's earnestness. In a sense they are historical novels too in that they give complete portraits of their times - but all novels are historical because they were written yesterday.

[Selene]

Adam, you nailed me.

Carol:

Now there you go again...as Ronald Reagan said to the incompetent boob "Jimma" Carter, I will have stand on my 5th and 14th Amendment rights against self incrimination and preserve your innocence as a proper widow woman.

Adam

[caroljane]

Adam, you nailed me.

Carol:

Now there you go again...as Ronald Reagan said to the incompetent boob "Jimma" Carter, I will have stand on my 5th and 14th Amendment rights against self incrimination and preserve your innocence as a proper widow woman.

Adam

Sir, you are a gentleman and a Constitutional scholar. You understand that post-Freudian slips can never be attributed to ladies who wear petticoats, and that what happens in the parlour (ooh-lala!)- stays in the parlour.

[Philip Coates]

> Phil, do you have any input into the selections for next year's books?

Daunce, yes I do. There are several great books groups in the greater Tampa Bay area. The monthly ones vary in how far in advance the books have already been selected. One other person and myself are both tired of too heavy an imbalance toward dark, depressing, or tragic books, as if those were the only kinds of 'serious' literature (or as if the only great plays Shakespeare wrote were his tragedies, to take another example.) Each of us is going to try to suggest some which are some combination of comic or positive or uplifting, yet still within the 'great books' rubric of books that have stood the test of time.

Here's what's already on the list so far for my 'local' group (so we'll be selecting for December and for 2012):

5/7/11: THE IDIOT (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

6/4/11: THE REPUBLIC (Plato)

7/2/11: PERE GORIOT (Honore de Balzac)

9/3/11: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (George Eliot)

10/1/11: THE TRIAL (Franz Kafka)

11/5/11: ON DREAMS (Sigmund Freud)

And for another group twenty miles away:

4/16/11: THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (Edith Wharton)

5/21/11: DEATH IN VENICE (Thomas Mann)

6/18/11: THE AWAKENING (Kate Chopin)

7/16/11: THE METAMORPHOSIS (Franz Kafka)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST

9/17/11: TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (Thomas Hardy)

10/15/11: DIALOGUES OF SOCRATES: APOLOGY AND CRITO (Plato)

11/19/11: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (William Shakespeare)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF DECEMBER

1/21/12: JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte)

2/18/12: THE BELL JAR (Sylvia Plath)

3/17/12: A PASSAGE TO INDIA (E.M. Forster)

4/21/12: MADAME BOVARY (Gustave Flaubert)

And for a third group in downtown Tampa I've never attended:

4/30/11: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (Ernest Hemingway)

5/28/11: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (Thomas Hardy)

6/25/11: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (James Baldwin)

7/30/11: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK (Annie Dillard)

,,,,,,,

By the way, in regard to Renault, I just ordered "The King Must Die" from Amazon. There were about twenty novels I -loved- when I was in high school***...and that was very high on the list and I want to see how I'll feel about it now.

***also stuff by Michener ("Hawaii"), Drury ("Advise and Consent" and the rest of that series), Irving Wallace ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), and lots of science fiction.

Of course none of these are likely to be approved as 'great books' for purposes of these groups.

They all gave me enormous pleasure and gripped me, so I'm curious how I'd view them critically were I to reread them.

It's amazing how much time I had to read novels as a teenager when I was in a fast track academic program and had two hours of track practice and math team and other stuff. Those 37 hour days don't stretch as much as they used to.

"My candle burns at both ends..."

Edited April 5, 2011 by Philip Coates

[caroljane]

> Phil, do you have any input into the selections for next year's books?

Daunce, yes I do. There are several great books groups in the greater Tampa Bay area. The monthly ones vary in how far in advance the books have already been selected. One other person and myself are both tired of too heavy an imbalance toward dark, depressing, or tragic books, as if those were the only kinds of 'serious' literature (or as if the only great plays Shakespeare wrote were his tragedies, to take another example.) Each of us is going to try to suggest some which are some combination of comic or positive or uplifting, yet still within the 'great books' rubric of books that have stood the test of time.

Here's what's already on the list so far for my 'local' group (so we'll be selecting for December and for 2012):

5/7/11: THE IDIOT (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

6/4/11: THE REPUBLIC (Plato)

7/2/11: PERE GORIOT (Honore de Balzac)

9/3/11: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (George Eliot)

10/1/11: THE TRIAL (Franz Kafka)

11/5/11: ON DREAMS (Sigmund Freud)

And for another group twenty miles away:

4/16/11: THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (Edith Wharton)

5/21/11: DEATH IN VENICE (Thomas Mann)

6/18/11: THE AWAKENING (Kate Chopin)

7/16/11: THE METAMORPHOSIS (Franz Kafka)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST

9/17/11: TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (Thomas Hardy)

10/15/11: DIALOGUES OF SOCRATES: APOLOGY AND CRITO (Plato)

11/19/11: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (William Shakespeare)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF DECEMBER

1/21/12: JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte)

2/18/12: THE BELL JAR (Sylvia Plath)

3/17/12: A PASSAGE TO INDIA (E.M. Forster)

4/21/12: MADAME BOVARY (Gustave Flaubert)

And for a third group in downtown Tampa I've never attended:

4/30/11: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (Ernest Hemingway)

5/28/11: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (Thomas Hardy)

6/25/11: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (James Baldwin)

7/30/11: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK (Annie Dillard)

,,,,,,,

By the way, in regard to Renault, I just ordered "The King Must Die" from Amazon. There were about twenty novels I -loved- when I was in high school***...and that was very high on the list and I want to see how I'll feel about it now.

***also stuff by Michener ("Hawaii"), Drury ("Advise and Consent" and the rest of that series), Irving Wallace ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), and lots of science fiction.

Of course none of these are likely to be approved as 'great books' for purposes of these groups.

They all gave me enormous pleasure and gripped me, so I'm curious how I'd view them critically were I to reread them.

It's amazing how much time I had to read novels as a teenager when I was in a fast track academic program and had two hours of track practice and math team and other stuff. Those 37 hour days don't stretch as much as they used to.

"My candle burns at both ends..."

"../it will not last the night/but O my foes and O my friends/ it gives a lovely light" (Millay)

The choices already made look fine. But I would really push for a Michener, solely on the grounds of understanding America and what has made it what it is today. Or Israel, for that matter ("The Source").

Edited April 5, 2011 by daunce lynam

[Philip Coates]

Daunce, you know I wouldn't think of quibbling with you but it's not two 'ohs', it's "ah, my foes, and oh, my friends"....which makes it more effective: both the change of two letter interjections & the commas that cause a pause after each exclamation.

-english teacher pedant schoolmarm

In any event, it's one of my favorite poems for capturing a certain type of person's spirit. I knew someone once in the Big Apple that the poem could have been written about.

[caroljane]

Daunce, you know I wouldn't think of quibbling with you but it's not two 'ohs', it's "ah, my foes, and oh, my friends"....which makes it more effective: both the change of two letter interjections & the commas that cause a pause after each exclamation.

-english teacher pedant schoolmarm

In any event, it's one of my favorite poems for capturing a certain type of person's spirit. I knew someone once in the Big Apple that the poem could have been written about.

You are right; but two ohs without punctuation would have made it more headlong, like the candle-burner, and less sage like the puctuationist. And if Edna had consulted me I am sure she would have agreed I was right.

[jriggenbach]

> Phil, do you have any input into the selections for next year's books?

Daunce, yes I do. There are several great books groups in the greater Tampa Bay area. The monthly ones vary in how far in advance the books have already been selected. One other person and myself are both tired of too heavy an imbalance toward dark, depressing, or tragic books, as if those were the only kinds of 'serious' literature (or as if the only great plays Shakespeare wrote were his tragedies, to take another example.) Each of us is going to try to suggest some which are some combination of comic or positive or uplifting, yet still within the 'great books' rubric of books that have stood the test of time.

Here's what's already on the list so far for my 'local' group (so we'll be selecting for December and for 2012):

5/7/11: THE IDIOT (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

6/4/11: THE REPUBLIC (Plato)

7/2/11: PERE GORIOT (Honore de Balzac)

9/3/11: THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (George Eliot)

10/1/11: THE TRIAL (Franz Kafka)

11/5/11: ON DREAMS (Sigmund Freud)

And for another group twenty miles away:

4/16/11: THE HOUSE OF MIRTH (Edith Wharton)

5/21/11: DEATH IN VENICE (Thomas Mann)

6/18/11: THE AWAKENING (Kate Chopin)

7/16/11: THE METAMORPHOSIS (Franz Kafka)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST

9/17/11: TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (Thomas Hardy)

10/15/11: DIALOGUES OF SOCRATES: APOLOGY AND CRITO (Plato)

11/19/11: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (William Shakespeare)

NO MEETING IN THE MONTH OF DECEMBER

1/21/12: JANE EYRE (Charlotte Bronte)

2/18/12: THE BELL JAR (Sylvia Plath)

3/17/12: A PASSAGE TO INDIA (E.M. Forster)

4/21/12: MADAME BOVARY (Gustave Flaubert)

And for a third group in downtown Tampa I've never attended:

4/30/11: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (Ernest Hemingway)

5/28/11: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (Thomas Hardy)

6/25/11: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (James Baldwin)

7/30/11: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK (Annie Dillard)

,,,,,,,

By the way, in regard to Renault, I just ordered "The King Must Die" from Amazon. There were about twenty novels I -loved- when I was in high school***...and that was very high on the list and I want to see how I'll feel about it now.

***also stuff by Michener ("Hawaii"), Drury ("Advise and Consent" and the rest of that series), Irving Wallace ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), and lots of science fiction.

Of course none of these are likely to be approved as 'great books' for purposes of these groups.

They all gave me enormous pleasure and gripped me, so I'm curious how I'd view them critically were I to reread them.

It's amazing how much time I had to read novels as a teenager when I was in a fast track academic program and had two hours of track practice and math team and other stuff. Those 37 hour days don't stretch as much as they used to.

"My candle burns at both ends..."

A number of these titles are, as I'm sure you know, either dark or tragic or both. I'd include in this The Mill on the Floss, The Trial, Death in Venice, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Madame Bovary, and For Whom the Bell Tolls (odd that none of these groups choose the best Hemingway novel, A Farewell to Arms, or a selection of the short stories. You can read The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls til the cows come home and, though both contain some memorable passages, you'll never get the best Hemingway has to offer).

JR

[caroljane]

Phil, re the candlelit 37-hour days,

"Was it for this I kicked the stairs

And sobbed and cursed and uttered prayers

That ,(as) domestic as a plate,

I now retire at half-past eight?"

-misremembered but will let you make the corrections.

JR is right, the list is too gloomy. Why not an Austen instead of Jane Eyre again, not Pride and Prejudice though, too fairy-taley. Persuasion is my favourite and Emma was Austen's favourite, and they're funny. Or black comedy - an Evelyn Waugh unless that is too English and lightweight for your group.

[Philip Coates]

> odd that none of these groups choose the best Hemingway novel, A Farewell to Arms, or a selection of the short stories. [Jeff]

Many of these groups have been in existence for a long time and I know at least one of them did Farewell. I only listed the monthly novel-length groups looking forward. There are also biweekly groups here that do short stories, essays, etc. This whole area is largely retirement communities and well-off, so people have time to read and are from a generation or more before the present poorly educated ones. Lots of PhD's, former professors, etc. I belong to two of those biweekly groups as well. (I can't keep up with that much reading so what I do is in each case I get the reading assignment and start it - or for a short story or essay read it in its entirety. Then I decide which I want to finish and wish I want to attend. My reading has vastly expanded over the last ten or fifteen years, especially since I started teaching literature nearly full time and have decided to teach proportionately less history, etc. But I still don't have more than 37 hours in a day.)

> Why not an Austen instead of Jane Eyre again..Persuasion is my favourite and Emma was Austen's favourite [Daunce]

I agree with including her (and I'm even going to let you slide for spelling 'favorite' incorrectly...twice). I've read P&P and thoroughly enjoyed it, would love a chance to read P or E. I have them sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. As a reader, for an author I like or I dislike yet makes me think in a new way, as opposed to a light thriller, I don't like to devour or rush to the end to find what happens all the works. For example, a lot of readers in their eagerness try to devour Atlas in one or three sittings. And they speed up, skip the speech, etc. I slowed down and, like bullets sinking into soft flesh, I let the impact shudder through me and paid attention to it and how it was happening. I like time for it to sink in, to mull it over, to mark up the pages, and then a year later read another. (Same processing approach as for great works of art in the European museums that literally changed my life.) That's one reason I'm not going to try to keep up with all the novels in all three monthly discussion groups.

(Alliteration alert) Why Waugh and which one would we?

Edited April 5, 2011 by Philip Coates

[caroljane]

(Alliteration alert) Why Waugh and which one would we?

Well, Waugh was a brilliant satirist, arguably in the Swiftean tradition, and his renditions of upper-class English society between the wars say a lot about his view of the Decline of Western Civilization, honour, morality etc. A Handful of Dust is the one I would pick - there's a poignant and funny Dickens reference in there too.

Waugh was a fairly dreadful person but terrific writer.

[Philip Coates]

...dammit, devilish daunce deliberately delivered deucedly too fast. was writing whimsy as followup query:

would we want waugh when whining, when witty, when worldly, when wooden, when wordy, or when wonderfully wise?

(now i might as well discard this post. too late.)

[Philip Coates]

It seems to me I started A Farewell to Arms when I was much younger and couldn't finish it. But, based on your recommendations [Jeff, Carol], I will add that and A Handful of Dust to the towering backlog and order them.

You both realize that we can't read all the time don't you? Potty breaks.

(From one of you, I'm going to need a schedule. Which book to read on Tuesdays. In what order. How much time per chapter. Etc.)

Edited April 5, 2011 by Philip Coates

[caroljane]

...dammit, devilish daunce deliberately delivered deucedly too fast. was writing whimsy as followup query:

would we want waugh when whining, when witty, when worldly, when wooden, when wordy, or when wonderfully wise?

(now i might as well discard this post. too late.)

It's never too late for that!

Would want Waugh when weary of worthy wordsmiths & wish wonderful whim-worship wallow.

[caroljane]

Jeff, what do you think of Appointment in Samarra? I believe it was OHara's first novel. I think it was the finest, most careful one he wrote.

[Philip Coates]

Now, Carol, you can't assume that Jeff or anyone has read everything. I realize he's a hundred and twelve years old but there's always a 10.2 to 1 ratio between "What! You Haven't Read THAT!" books everyone 'should have read' and books there is time to have read. Wish the damn writers hadn't been writing stuff for two or three thousand years. (Which brings up another issue, about the modernity bias or slant. But enuff for now.)

Edited April 5, 2011 by Philip Coates

[jriggenbach]

Jeff, what do you think of Appointment in Samarra? I believe it was OHara's first novel. I think it was the finest, most careful one he wrote.

It's been a long time, Carol. I haven't read any O'Hara in nearly 40 years. I remember reading Frank MacShane's biography of O'Hara back in 1980 and thinking then that I'd like to re-read Appointment in Samarra and rethink the whole thing. But I've never got around to it. I can see my poor, neglected copy sitting forlornly on the shelf from where I sit. The title - and the snippet of Maugham from which it's taken - is a masterpiece.

JR